Is is the number 1 or the letter I?

taradinoc / mdl-docs

The MDL Programming Language by S. W. Galley and Greg Pfister

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Is is the number 1 or the letter I? #7

Closed OrangeToucan closed 7 years ago

OrangeToucan commented 7 years ago

In reading through the Notation section of the Foreward and comparing to the physical book I'm not sure if the sections recommended for an uninitiate's first reading are marked by the number 1 or the letter I in square brackets. I've tried comparing that glyph there with others throughout the book but it's still not clear to me. Do you have any thoughts?

OrangeToucan commented 7 years ago

I should say 1 could make sense since it's the first time, but so could I because they are an initiate.

OrangeToucan commented 7 years ago

Having the original sources for the book would be nice to clarify, but I suppose that's been lost to time, along with the PUB system that it was made with: http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html "PUB is all but forgotten. It is not even mentioned in histories of Scribe and TeX."

(From the comment in the book that "This document was prepared using the PUB system (originally from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)"...

taradinoc commented 7 years ago

I believe it's a 1.

I found a cleaner scan of an earlier version of the document on intfiction.org. The link there is broken, but I downloaded it at the time: MDL Primer and Manual.pdf

OrangeToucan commented 7 years ago

Thank you for that. Yes, it does seem to be a 1.